IT Organization Circa 2017

This post picks up on Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 and examines the fifth of Deming’s 14 Management Points, which urges:

Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs”

Continuous Improvement Takes Hold…

Deming’s fifth point was at the heart of his teachings – the whole idea of continuous improvement.  Again, we see the idea of “constantly” (from his first point, Constancy of purpose), this time augmented for emphasis with the “and forever.”  Note, he refers to the “system of production and service.”  Ever the engineer at heart, Deming saw things through the lens of systems thinking, with its loops of causes and effects.  “To improve quality and productivity”.  Deming always presented these two sides of the coin – quality leads to productivity.  And for emphasis, in case management missed the point, he calls out, “thus to constantly decrease costs.”

This continuous improvement concept was fully embraced by post-war Japan thanks to Deming’s lectures and teachings with remarkable results.  In fact, the impact on Japanese manufacturing and business success was so great, that the US and Europe began to take notice in the 80′s and 90′s.  In the US, the Malcolm Baldrige Award drove many companies to implement Total Quality Management programs to great effect as company names such as Corning, Motorola, Milliken became virtually synonymous with quality and business success.

Continuous Improvement Takes a Back Seat!

In the 1990′s, the late Michael Hammer, with Jim Champy, published Reengineering The Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.  The ideas in this book caught the American leadership imagination.  It was more fun to tear down and start over, with the promise of quick, dramatic returns, than to go through the slower, more incremental improvement path.  Just as TQM was really taking hold, the reengineering consultants moved in.  Please don’t get me wrong – lots of great things came out of business process reengineering, but I regret that the disciplines associated with continuous improvement got brushed aside in the process.  The good news is that continuous improvement is gradually finding its way back into the lexicon of management methods, often in the guise of 6 Sigma and related quality improvement methods.

Do you have a culture of continuous quality improvement in your IT organization?  If not, why not?  What can you do to make a difference?

Graphic courtesy of EveryJoe.com

Filed under: Change Management, IT Management, Useful Tools Tagged: | Continuous Improvement Process, IT transformation, Michael Hammer, six sigma, Total Quality Management